| The ability of social media messages to mobilize protest is an increasingly important area of scholarly inquiry. From the Arab Uprisings, to Gezi Park, to Black Lives Matter, to #NoBanNoWall, images of and stories about protest movements calling for social justice with the coordinated use of social media have become a ubiquitous part of the 24-hour news cycle. Indeed, disseminating information about protests taking place is a common function of Twitter and other social media sites. Moreover, many commentators have attributed immense viral power to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to galvanize engagement through messages and images and stoke widespread participatory intent. This dissertation adds to the literature on social media and protest participation by examining the protest-mobilizing potential of tweets about key social issues in the United States, namely, forceful police action and institutionalized racism. Specifically, this study explores (a) the mobilizing potential of social media (e.g., Twitter) images about social protests compared to textual-based messages to stimulate protest intentions, and (b) whether anger-evoking or efficacy-eliciting protest related messages will mobilize Caucasian viewers for collective action at different levels. A 2 (tweet modality: image vs. textual) x 3 (tweet content type: anger-evoking, efficacy-eliciting, neutral), between-subjects experimental design is employed to answer these questions, with collective action intention being the main dependent variable. Contrary to expectations, the results produced no evidence that image-based tweets are better than text-based ones, or that emotional content is better than non-emotional content, at motivating citizens to become politically engaged. Anger-evoking, image-based protest tweets about Black Lives Matter were only marginally more galvanizing among Caucasians than non-anger evoking image-based tweets. However, the results showed that efficacy-eliciting textual tweets stoked greater intention to participate than efficacy-eliciting image tweets. Possible reasons for the findings are discussed in light of the social psychology of collective action and the potential limitations of the study. Practical recommendations are provided to social movement activists in order to recruit followers through the use of social networking sites. |
